When the sea washed away his house for the third time,
Abdul Motlab and his family left for Dhaka. Ten years later,
their home is a lean-to tacked on to the end of their eldest
son’s shack.

Since moving to Dhaka from
the coast, the Motlabs live a
precarious existence.
Hazel Healy

The makeshift homestead lies in the shadow of a building
site, which spews out bricks and rubble – they have strung a
net over the tin roof to catch the debris. Abdul and his wife
Anoura are in their late fifties; they live here with five of
their seven children and a four-month-old granddaughter.

Dirty, dangerous and prone to flooding in monsoon,
this precarious squat on an unused lot in the Mohamedpur
district is one of the better places they have lived in during
the last 10 years.

‘The settlers in the slums would not let us set up house,’
says Anoura. ‘They were very violent.’ After months living
by the roadside, they managed to erect a small hut with
a jute roof in a temporary settlement, where they lived in
constant fear of eviction. When expulsion duly came, it was
fast and brutal. ‘The police didn’t let us finish our lunch.’

The entire Motlab clan subsists on the eldest son’s daily
income of $2.50. It’s not enough for three meals a day.
‘We didn’t expect it be as hard as this,’ says Abdul. His
face is lined with worry – the relative peace they enjoyed
here will soon be over. The owner of the lot plans to build
an apartment block and has given them marching orders.
Resigned, Abdul says that Allah will find them a new place.

Space is at a premium in Dhaka, now the world’s fastest
growing megacity. It doubled in size – from 6 to 12 million
– between 1990 and 2005, hit 16 million not long ago and
has 400,000 people arrive every year.

‘Where will they all go?’ wonders Bilkis Uddin, who lives
round the corner from the Motlabs. ‘They’ll have to stack
them one on top of the other – there’ll be nowhere to put
your feet.’ And then, looking more worried: ‘The rent will
be tripled!’

Bilkis is a pragmatic, dynamic woman who is overseeing
her recently arrived sister-in-law Monowara’s insertion into
urban life.

Monowara, her husband and four children pay $27
a month to rent a three-by-three metre corrugated iron
box. In this claustrophobic space, relationships suffer
and quarrels are frequent. The shacks are roasting in the
summer, plagued by mosquitoes and regularly invaded by
rats. In this settlement 60 people share one latrine and one
water tap. Someone is always sick, around half the children
are not in school.

Monowara is not managing the transition well. ‘Only
money matters here,’ she says in a low monotone. ‘Before, I
had ducks, chickens and goats. Life was easy in comparison.
Now we have to work very hard just to eat.’

The river evicted Monowara’s family from their village
near Bhola island in stages. First they lost their land, so her
husband went to work as a rickshaw driver in a nearby town.
But when the river took the house, they had no choice but
to migrate. Ever-enterprising, Bilkis has got her brother a
job as a security guard and Monowara earns $19 per month
doing domestic work. But even though both parents work,
they cannot afford to keep their seven-year-old daughter
Onu in school.

‘Bhola was calm and peaceful. If I could just get
something to live off, I’d go back,’ says Monowara. If she
manages it, she’ll be swimming against the tide: glacier melt
and heavier monsoons will see rivers eroding 20 per cent more land by 2050. Oxfam estimates that coastal and river
erosion, on average, destroys the livelihoods of between
50,000 to 200,000 people and forces 60,000 out of their
homes every year.

The urban slums or bustees that had no space for the
Motlabs can be seen all over Dhaka. Some still have the
trappings of the countryside. Around the edge of one not
far from Shyamoli district, cows pick through the rubbish
and ducks swim in ponds of fetid water. A boy rubs the bare
injured foot of a wailing toddler and lands a kiss on it. Close
by, groups of people sort through stinking piles of rubbish.

These kinds of settlements are the face of an urban
future. Over a third of Dhaka’s residents now live in slums.

As Bangladesh’s rural areas stagnate, the flight to the
cities continues. Currently 75 per cent rural, Bangladesh is
likely to be a nation of city-dwellers by 2050.

A climate-stressed environment will intensify this breakneck
urbanization. Major cities are likely to be first port of
call and urban infrastructure is severely wanting. Dhaka is
often gridlocked and faces a looming freshwater crisis.

Until now the government’s poverty-reduction
programmes have neglected the urban poor in favour of the
‘deserving’ rural poor. NGO s tend to focus more on rural
areas, too.

Squatters are being evicted to make way for new flats in Dhaka, where
land is at a premium.
Hazel Healy

Established city élites associate new migrants with
squalor and crime. Removal, not assistance, is their answer.
In the Bangladeshi imagination their country is rural;
the village is romanticized as a lush, green harmonious
place, in contrast to the dangerous ‘amoral city’.1

On a more practical level, it’s also not as easy to help the
urban poor. Cities have complex governance systems, with a
plethora of overlapping metropolitan agencies. The constant
threat of eviction dissuades NGO s from investing in bustees.
The urban poor have little political clout or leverage over
institutions – they only got the right to vote in municipal
elections in 1994.

But the people will come, whether cities make space
for them or not, squeezing in between buildings, like
the Motlabs and the Uddins. One solution would be to
recognize climate migrants as Internally Displaced People,
with rights to basic services such as sanitation, schooling
and healthcare.

Urban planning will need to figure hugely in climate adaptation. After delivering millions of destitute migrants,
global warming will act directly on Dhaka, which spills
out unplanned across a floodplain. Heat stress, along with
riverine and coastal floods, are among the hazards looming
on the horizon. By 2070, Dhaka will join the list of ‘cities
most exposed’ to climate change, according to the UN.

Dhaka’s streets turn into rivers after just one hour of
rain. But while storm drains are being installed in areas
such as middle-class Dhanmondi, slums are less well catered
for, though far more exposed.

The urban poor cluster in the most dangerous places,
building weak structures alongside rivers. Left to their
own devices, people have thought up their own adaptation
techniques. In Korail, the biggest and oldest slum,
inhabitants shade their roofs with creepers, and stock up on
saleable assets for use in a crisis. They have sand bags, raised
platforms and those near the water’s edge build on stilts.

Meet the stayers

There are also those who are left behind. The villages of
southwest Bangladesh are thinning out. The destruction
wreaked by Cyclone Aila in May 2009 shattered the lives of
millions, wiping out crops and homes across the coastal area
and leaving many with no way to recover.

Satkira shares a border with India. Many people are
drifting over the frontier to seek work in its booming cities.
This is a well-trodden path for millions of Bangladeshis, but
environmental stresses are increasing the traffic.

Last January during a Hindu festival, 100 families
took advantage of the guards’ celebrations to slip across
the border – part river, part fence. Fatima Hasan knows
this because her husband has followed the same route, ‘an
unseen way’ as she describes it.

Her family were hit by a double disaster. First Cyclone
Aila washed away everything they owned, when the storm
surge broke through the embankment at the very place
where her house stood – sending her running for her life.

A few months later, her husband was collecting fish and
crabs from the Sundarbans mangrove forest when he was
robbed and viciously beaten by thieves. His injuries were
so bad he could no longer go out to fish, and he moved to
Kolkata in India. The story has ended happily – he is under
treatment and working in a shop. Fatima worries about his
health but they speak every other day.

The story shows how temporary migration can be a coping strategy. The house is rebuilt and her husband will return in
two years’ time. Until the next disaster, they are safe.

By 2050, a 30-centimetre sea-level rise may displace 10
per cent of the country (currently the equivalent of the
population of the Netherlands). A one-metre rise will
submerge up to a fifth of the country – permanently.

No-one knows this better than India. It approaches
Bangladeshi migration with ‘national security’ rhetoric, and
has engaged in an aggressive fence-building programme.
Worse still, border guards have shot an estimated 1,000
people over the last 10 years – including minors – who
they usually accuse of cattle smuggling or drug trafficking.
These atrocities, which are met with passive equanimity by
the Bangladeshi government, come with such regularity
that they are interpreted by some as a deliberate policy
geared at sending a warning.

A piece of Texas

Bangladesh has a big problem. Too many people are
living in dangerous places – thanks to global warming.
Vulnerable cities are overflowing and trigger-happy border
guards ring the delta. With no ecological reparations
forthcoming, how about opening up the borders of the
rich West? Remittances from the Bangladeshi diaspora
already supply 11 per cent of GDP.

A government minister once challenged anyone who
caught a flight to offer up a spare room to a Bangladeshi
family. Other pundits have called for land where people can
relocate. But, however just, the likelihood of the US ringfencing
a piece of Texas for Bangladesh is slim. Government
estimates for climate-induced displacement are eight million
people by 2050 (the same as the population of Israel).

Bangladesh has also called for the recognition of
climate refugees under a new UN refugee convention.
Environmentalists have embraced this idea, as refugees
are living proof of climate change. But migration scholar
François Gemenne points out that ‘canaries in the
coalmines were never saved: their function was to alert.’ He
worries that the ‘act now or fear the refugees’ mantra is in
danger of playing into the hands of the far right. Migration
campaigners shrink in horror at the idea of renegotiating
the Refugee Convention for fear of losing the few existing
hard-won rights. They push, instead, for liberalization of
existing migration policy.

The most likely scenario is that the few people that can,
will use existing migration corridors. The Bangladeshi
diaspora extends all over the world. When they come, we
should welcome them.

Banks et al. ‘Neglecting the urban poor in Bangladesh: research, policy
and action in the context of climate change’, Brooks World Poverty Institute,
March 2011.

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